Synopsis

America's master of noir delivers his masterpiece, a rip-roaring, devilishly wild ride through the bloody end of the 1960's. It's dark baby, and hot hot hot.

Martin Luther King assassinated. Robert Kennedy assassinated. Los Angeles, 1968. Conspiracies theories are taking hold. On the horizon looms the Democratic Convention in Chicago and constant gun fire peppers south L.A. Violence, greed, and grime, are replacing free-love and everybody from Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover to the right-wing assassins and left-wing revolutionaries are getting dirty. At the center of it all is a triumvirate: the president’s strong-arm goon, an ex-cop and heroine runner, and a private eye whose quarry is so dangerous she could set off the whole powder keg. With his trademark deadly staccato prose, James Ellroy holds nothing back in this wild, startling and much anticipated conclusion to his Underworld USA trilogy.

A comp suite at the Stardust, vouchered by Carlos Marcello. Carlos knew that Janice had terminal cancer and that he had chemistry skills.

Wayne mixed morphine clay with ammonia. A two-minute heating loosened mica chips and silt. He boiled water to 182°. He added acetic anhydride and reduced the bond proportions. The boil sluiced out organic waste.

Wayne mixed, measured and ran two hot plates low. He glanced around the suite. The maid left a newspaper out. The headlines were all him.

Wayne Senior's death by "heart attack." James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan in stir.

His front-page ink. No mention of him. Carlos had chilled out Wayne Senior. Mr. Hoover chilled out the backwash on the King/Bobby hits.

Wayne watched diacetyl mass build. His blend would semi-anesthetize Janice. He was bucking for a big job with Howard Hughes. Hughes was addicted to pharmaceutical narcotics. He could cook him up a private blend and take it to his interview.

The mass settled into cubes and rose out of the liquid. Wayne saw photos of Ray and Sirhan on page two. He'd worked on the King hit. His worked it high up. Freddy Otash ran fall guy Ray for King and fall guy Sirhan for Bobby.

The phone rang. Wayne grabbed it. Scrambler clicks hit the line. It had to be a Fed safe phone and Dwight Holly.

"It's me, Dwight."

"Did you kill him?"

"Yes."

" 'Heart attack,' shit. 'Sudden stroke' would have been better." Wayne coughed. "Carlos is handling it personally. He can frost out anything around here."

"I do not want Mr. Hoover going into a tizzy over this." "It's chilled. The question is, 'What about the others?' "

Dwight said, "There's always conspiracy talk. Bump off a public figure and that kind of shit tends to bubble. Freddy ran Ray covertly and Sirhan up front, but he lost weight and altered his appearance. All in all, I'd say we're chilled on both of them."

Wayne stared at the picture. "My father was your friend. You're going in pretty light with the judgment."

"Shit, kid. He sent you to Dallas."

Big D. November '63. He was there that Big Weekend. He caught the Big Moment and took this Big Ride.

He was a sergeant on Vegas PD. He was married. He had a chemistry degree. His father was a big Mormon fat cat. Wayne Senior was jungled up all over the nut Right. He did Klan ops for Mr. Hoover and Dwight Holly. He pushed high-line hate tracts. He rode the far-Right zeitgeist and stayed in the know. He knew about the JFK hit. It was multi-faction: Cuban exiles, rogue CIA, mob. Senior bought Junior a ticket to ride.

Extradition job, with one caveat: kill the extraditee.

The PD suborned the assignment. A Negro pimp named Wendell Durfee shivved a casino dealer. The man lived. It didn't matter. The Casino Operators' Council wanted Wendell clipped. Vegas cops got those jobs. They were choice gigs with big bonus money. They were tests. The PD wanted to gauge your balls. Wayne Senior had clout with the PD. He had JFK hit knowledge. Senior wanted Junior there for it. Wendell Durfee fled Vegas to Dallas. Senior doubted Junior's balls. Senior thought Junior should kill an unarmed black man. Wayne flew to Dallas on 11/22/63.

He did not want to kill Wendell Durfee. He did not know about the JFK hit. He got paired up with an extradition partner. The cop's name was Maynard Moore. He worked Dallas PD. He was a redneck psycho doing gofer jobs on the hit.

Wayne clashed with Maynard Moore and tried not to kill Wendell Durfee. Wayne blundered into the hit plot in post-hit free fall. He linked Jack Ruby to Moore and that right-wing merc Pete B. He saw Ruby clip Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV.

He knew. He did not know that his father knew. It all went blooey that Sunday.

Pete considered his own act of mercy prudent and Wayne's act of mercy rash. Pete warned Wayne that Wendell Durfee might show up again.

Wayne returned to Vegas. Pete B. moved to Vegas for a Carlos Marcello gig. Pete followed up on Durfee and logged tips: he's a rape-o shitbird and worse. It was January '64. Pete heard that Wendell Durfee had fled back to Vegas. He told Wayne. Wayne went after Wendell. Three colored dope fiends got in the way. Wayne killed them. Wendell Durfee raped and murdered Wayne's wife, Lynette.

It was his very own free fall. It started in Dallas and spun all the way up to Now.

Wendell Durfee escaped. Wayne Senior and the PD worked to get Wayne a walk on the dope fiends. Mr. Hoover was amenable. Senior's old chum Dwight Holly was not. Dwight was working for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics then. The dope fiends were pushing heroin and were targeted for prosecution. Dwight squawked to the U.S. attorney. Wayne Junior fucked up his investigation. He wanted to see Wayne Junior indicted and tried. The PD fabricated some evidence and snowed the grand jury. Wayne got a walk on the killings. It left him hollow. He quit the PD and entered The Life.

Soldier of fortune. Heroin runner. Assassin.

Lynette was dead. He vowed to find Wendell Durfee and kill him. Lynette was his best friend and sweetheart and the wall to shut out his love for his father's second wife. Janice was older, she watched him grow up, she stayed with Senior for his money and clout. Janice returned Wayne's love. The longing went both ways. It stayed there and plain grew.

Wayne fell in with Pete and his wife, Barb. Pete was tight with a mob lawyer named Ward Littell. Ward was ex-FBI and the point man for the JFK hit. He was working for Carlos Marcello and Howard Hughes and playing both ends back, front and sideways. Wayne had Pete and Ward as teachers. He learned The Life from them. He blew through their curriculum at a free-fall pace.

Pete was hopped up on the Cuban exile cause. Vietnam was getting hot. Howard Hughes was nurturing crazy plans to buy up Las Vegas. Wayne Senior got in with Hughes' Mormon guard. Ward Littell developed a grudge against Senior. A rogue CIA man recruited Pete for a Saigon-to-Vegas dope funnel, profits to the Cuban cause, vouchsafed by Carlos Marcello. Pete needed a dope chemist and recruited Wayne. Ward's hatred of Wayne Senior grew. Ward fucked with Senior. He informed Wayne that his father sent him to Dallas.

Wayne reeled and grabbed at air and barely stayed upright. Wayne fucked Janice in his father's house and made sure that Wayne Senior saw it.

"The Life," a noun. A haven for Mormon burnouts, rogue chemists, coon killers.

Wayne Senior divorced Janice. He beat her with a silver-tipped cane to offset the cost of the settlement. Janice limped from that day on and still played scratch golf. Ward Littell sold Howard Hughes Las Vegas at the mob's inflated prices and began a sporadic love affair with Janice. Wayne Senior increased his pull with Howard Hughes and sucked up to former veep Dick Nixon. Dwight Holly left the Bureau of Narcotics and went back on the FBI. Mr. Hoover directed Dwight to disrupt Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Dwight deployed Wayne Senior in anti-Klan mail-fraud ops, a sop to sob sisters at Justice.

Wayne cooked heroin in Saigon and ran it through to Vegas. Wayne chased Wendell Durfee for four years. The country blew up with riots and a shitstorm of race hate. Dr. King trumped Mr. Hoover on all moral fronts and wore the old man down just by being. Mr. Hoover had tried everything. Mr. Hoover whined to Dwight that he had done all he could. Dwight understood the cue and recruited Wayne Senior. Wayne Senior wanted Wayne Junior to be in on it. Senior thought they needed a recruitment wedge. Dwight went out and found Wendell Durfee.

Wayne got a pseudo-anonymous tip. He found Wendell Durfee on L.A. skid row and killed him in March. It was a put-up job. Dwight gathered forensic evidence and coerced him into the hit plan. Wayne worked with his father, Dwight, Freddy Otash and pro shooter Bob Relyea.

Janice was diagnosed with last-stage cancer. Her beating injuries cloaked early detection of the disease. The Saigon dope deal factionalized and blew into chaos. On one side: mob ghouls and crazy Cuban exiles. On the other: Wayne, Pete and a French merc named Jean-Philippe Mesplede. April and May were pure free fall. The election hovered. King was dead. Carlos Marcello and the boys decided to clip Bobby Kennedy. Pete was coerced in. Freddy O. waltzed over from the King hit. Ward Littell was still working angles on Carlos and Howard Hughes. Ward had inherited an anti-mob file. He left it with Janice for safekeeping.

Wayne went to see Janice on June 4. The cancer had taken her strength and her curves and had rendered her slack. They made love a second time. She told him more about Ward's file. He searched her apartment and found it. The file was very detailed. It specifically indicted Carlos and his New Orleans operation. Wayne sent it to Carlos, along with a note.

"Sir, my father was planning to extort you with this file. Sir, could we discuss that?"

"Don't make like I don't know you. You're Pete and Ward's guy, and you worked for me in Saigon. You know more about me than you should, plus all the shit in that file. I know your story, which is some fucking story compared to the other dickhead stories I heard lately."

Wayne smiled. Carlos pulled two bobbing-head dolls from his pockets. One doll represented RFK. One doll represented Dr. King. Carlos smiled and snapped off their heads.

"Salud, Wayne."

"Thank you, Carlos."

"You're looking for work, right? This ain't about a handshake and a thank-you envelope."

Wayne sipped wine. It was present-day liquor-store vintage.

"I want to assume Ward Littell's role in your organization, along with the position in the Hughes organization that my father had just inherited from Ward. I have the skills and the connections to prove myself valuable, I'm prepared to favor you in all my dealings with Mr. Hughes, and I'm aware of the penalties you dispense for disloyalty."

"Where's your father going to be throughout all of this?" Wayne toppled the RFK doll. A plastic arm fell off. Carlos picked his nose.

"Okay, even if I'm fucking susceptible to favors and prone to like you, why should Howard Hughes go outside his own organization full of suck-asses he feels comfortable with to hire a fucked-up ex-cop who goes around shooting niggers for kicks?"

Wayne flinched. He gripped his wine glass and almost snapped the stem.

"Mr. Hughes is a xenophobic drug addict known to inject narcotics into a vein in his penis, and I can concoct-"

"-Drugs that will stimulate and sedate him and diminish his mental capacities to the point that he will become that much more tractable in all his dealings with you. I also know that you have a very large envelope for Richard Nixon, should he be nominated. Mr. Hughes is putting in 20%, and I plan to raid my father's cash reserve and get you another five million cold."

The toga geek walked in. He brought a sponge and swabbed the mess presto-chango. Carlos snapped his fingers. The toga geek disappeared.

"I keep coming back to your father. What's Wayne Tedrow Senior going to be doing while Wayne Tedrow Junior sticks him the big one where it hurts the most?"

Wayne pointed to the dolls and back up to heaven. Carlos cracked his knuckles.

"Okay, I'll bite."

Wayne raised his glass. "Thank you."

Carlos raised his glass. "You get two fifty a year and points, and you jump on Ward's old job straight off. I need you to oversee the buyouts of legitimate businesses started with Teamster Pension Fund loans, so we can launder it and funnel it into a slush fund to build these hotel-casinos somewhere in Central America or the Caribbean. You know what we're looking for. We want some pliable, anti-Communist el jefe type who'll do what we want and keep all the dissident hippie protest shit down to a dull roar. Sam G.'s running point now. We've got it narrowed down to Panama, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. That's your main fucking job. You make it happen and you make your hophead pal keep buying our hotels, and you make sure we get to keep our inside guys, who just might help us out with some skim."

About James Ellroy

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz, and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. These seven novels have won numerous honors and were international best sellers. Ellroy currently lives in Los Angeles.

www.jamesellroy.net

James Ellroy is represented by Random House Speakers Bureau (http://www.rhspeakers.com).

Author Q&A

Q:It’s been 8 years since The Cold Six Thousand. How excited are you that Blood’s A Rover is finally being published?

A: Yes, it’s been eight years since my novel, The Cold Six Thousand. I was that long between books for a variety of reasons, all of which are determining factors in the Beethovian greatness of Blood’s A Rover. One, my marriage had to go in the shitter–as I rigorously held on to the friendship of my beloved ex-wife and most astute critic, Helen Knode. Helen convinced me to write a more emotionally and stylistically accessible novel–one that plumbed the murky recesses of my tortured, tender and perverted heart!!! Two, I had to become deeply embroiled with the transcendent woman, Joan, who re-taught me American history from the ground up. Three, I made a conscious decision to write an entirely different kind of novel–one that explored spiritual and political conversion on an all-new level, while, of course, adhering to readily identifiable and identifiably groovy Ellroy shit!!! This IS my greatest novel–and I owe it all to Helen, the Red Goddess Joan, and a woman named Cathy, with a daughter named Theodora, who was the basis for Karen Sifakis and her daughter, Eleanora. Life is full of groovy, twisted, curveball shit, and Blood’s A Rover explodes, both with autobiography and my knowledge of history, linked to a deep personal resolve.

Q:How does this book differ from the other two books in the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy? The plot is quite complex, and there are tons of characters. How did you keep all the story lines straight?

A: Truth be told, it’s markedly less complex than The Cold Six Thousand and slightly more complex than American Tabloid. The historical period–1968-1972–is less iconic than the periods covered in the first two books; thus, I had greater latitude to fictionalize. Again, this is a novel of outward revolution and revolution of the soul. There is greater dialectic in this novel than in my previous twelve novels combined. How did I keep the storyline straight? I wrote a 397-page outline, that laid out the action, down to the most minute detail. Meticulousness, diligence, profoundly rigorous work habits all contributed to the greatness of this novel. During the odd moments that my super-human resolve faltered, I stared at the numerous portraits of Beethoven that adorn my pad and at the photo of Joan that I keep on my nightstand (the left side, of course).

Q: As in the first two books, readers will recognize a lot of the names in Blood’s A Rover–Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon to name a few. So how much of the story is really true?

A: Yeah, Gay Edgar Hoover, Howard “Dracula” Hughes, and Tricky Dick Nixon appear again–but they are differentiated from my previous portrayals, as THEIR lives head for the shitter at a breakneck pace. As for what’s real and what’s not, let’s just say that gaps in actual recorded history have been kind to me, and, again, have allowed me latitude for creating fiction. My intent is to create a seamless fictional history; thus, questions like this one I tend to dodge and swerve around.

Q: There are three main characters in this book, Wayne Tedrow, Jr., Dwight Holly, and Donald Crutchfield, but Crutchfield is really the primary protagonist. You’ve said that in many ways he’s an odd hero. Why is that?

A: Aaaaahhhhh, my unholy troika–Don Crutchfield, Wayne Tedrow, Dwight Holly–all bad men in love with strong women!!!!! They are all recognizably Ellrovian, but Crutch–at 23–is the youngest of my protagonists, ever–and is, like his creator was at that age–a perved-out, window-peeping dipshit. He is also a profound voice of the great American qualities of indefatigable will, ingenuity and pitbull-like persistence. He keeps getting his ass kicked, and he keeps coming back!!!!! You gots to dig dat!!!!! All drama is a man-meets-a-woman; he FOLLOWS a woman for six hundred pages, has a brief liaison with her, and in the epilogue follows her for the rest of his life. I revere him for that; it is something I would do myself.

Q: The other thing about Donald Crutchfield is that he’s actually a real person. How did you meet him?

A: I met Crutch in ‘99, dug his wheelman/P.I. spiel and impulsively co-opted him to the book. It was a smart, instinctive move on my part–because Crutch hipped me to a world I did not know existed, and his relative youth in 1968 played in perfectly to my dramatic design: DIPSHIT KID AS SECRET VOICE OF AMERICAN HISTORY!!!!!!!!!

Q: You tackle some potent issues in this book involving race, crime, and social justice. How much did you intend the book to be a social commentary? Clearly a lot of these issues are still highly relevant today.

A: Yes, this book is highly topical, dialectical and full of exploitable contemporary reference, although I did not write it with those intentions in mind. Race, class, gender, sexual identity, seismic explosions within the body politic–call me prophetic, call me lucky, call me prescient. I am a student of history and an ignorer of contemporary culture, which allows me to live in the historical periods I write about with a fully-honed attention. There is a universal and timeless feel to Blood’s A Rover, even though it is quite period-specific. It’s the immersion process: I was THERE all the time I was writing the book.

Q: The hate and racism of the time period that you cover can be difficult to take at times. Did you find it hard to write?

A: It was EASY to write all the racial invective in this novel, because the story required it; because my bad white men come to renounce their racist beliefs; because racial humor is quite often hilarious and it is hypocritical to assert that it is not; because ugly language is a necessary corollary in a book entirely about the revolutionary tides of history. I feel no social obligation to mediate racial comments with apologies; I will read Black Panther/pimp schtick aloud, with broad racial inflections at my upcoming book gigs. Racism is a casual attribute of my characters, more than a defining characteristic, so PCers are confused–because guys they are supposed to get to dig are saying vile shit. I intend to grab the issue of race like a ravenous pitbull during my upcoming Knopf tour and milk it for all it worth.

Q: Blood’s A Rover has many varied settings including L.A., which clearly you know intimately, but also Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Have you spent much time in these countries?

A: Yeah, I know L.A. intimately–but no way was I going to shag my skinny white ass over to Haiti and the D.R. I sent a researcher–she had a blast–I read her notes, examined her slides and studied her maps. Fiction is verisimilitude–in the end, it all comes down to how well you can make this shit up!!!!! HISTORY: what a blast to rewrite it to your own specifications.

Q: Over the years you’ve developed a very distinct writing style, but who were some of your early inspirations?

A: My style is deliberately provocative and outrageous: it is meant to be both challenging and wildly raw and entertaining. As a youngster, I loved the police novels of Joseph Wambaugh–but for years now, I haven’t read fiction, I just lay around in the dark, brooding, listening to Beethoven and waiting for women to call me on the phone. I’m a genius!!!!! I’m sui generis!!!!! I’d be insufferable if I wasn’t such a sweet-natured and groovy guy.

Q: Over the last few months, Playboy has been serializing your next project The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women. Can you tell us a little bit about this new work?

A: Yeah, The Hilliker Curse, subtitled “My Pursuit of Women,” a four-part serialization in Playboy, a Knopf book in a significantly enlarged form, most likely sometime next year. This memoir details my obsessive spiritual quest and dissects–with unprecedented rigor–the male romantic urge. The book is a companion to my 1996 memoir, My Dark Places, the story of my mother’s 1958 murder. I conceived this book while writing Blood’s A Rover, in a state of desperate mooning for Joan, while I tried to convince Cathy to divorce her husband and marry me, while my ex-wife Helen gave me nightly ass-kickings and urged me to cool my jets, and look to the deep psychic truth that informs my horny, aging burn-out on a mission of LOVE soul. You heard it first here: Blood’s A Rover will be HUGE–but The Hilliker Curse will be a spiritual text for the ages!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Q: I have to ask, where did your nickname the Demon Dog of American Literature come from? Anything to do with Knopf’s own canine logo the Borzoi?

A: I have never understood where I got the Demon Dog moniker. Maybe it’s because I chase cats, wear designer flea collars, drink toilet water, bay at moons, and urinate to mark my turf. I DO identify with the Knopf Borzoi!!!!! That dog is 94 years old and still going strong!!!!! Let’s get him a comb-out and a flea dip, so I can take him on the Blood’s A Rover tour with me.

From the Hardcover edition.

Praise

Praise

"Darker, stranger and more compelling than almost anything else contemporary fiction has to offer."--Washington Post

“Readers who love their noir blood-red will be giddy over Blood’s A Rover, the bang-up conclusion to James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy . . . Ellroy’s prose is spare and riveting [and] his plot is hardball start to finish.”—USA Today

“A high-water mark in the career of one of America's best historical novelists.”—Denver Post

"Brilliant . . . There are no soft edges to this novel."--Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Another cocktail of speculative pop-pulp fiction, conspiracy-theorist wet dreams and a beguiling alternative history. Fans will be pleased as rum punch."--Time Out, New York

“The four-page intro has more acts of violence than hours of prime-time TV. The first word of the first chapter is ‘heroin.’. . Raymond Chandler, the founding father of hardboiled noir and one of Ellroy’s heroes, would have agreed with this approach.”—New York Post“Fascinating. . . . Ellroy contextualizes expertly, bringing everyone from a swish Leonard Bernstein to a randy Redd Foxx to a junkie Sonny Liston onto his lurid playing field.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“I was hooked on the first page . . . By the last page . . . I picked my jaw up from the floor and quietly closed the book. Wow.”—Randy Michael Signor, Chicago Sun-Times

“Exhilarating. . . . A snitch epic, a history observed by the bad men and women who shaped it.”—Portland Oregonian